Thinking of Windows
by Moe Machina
Summary: Pre-game. A girl wakes up in a hospital and has no words. Gen.


** Thinking of Windows**

_Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:  
The sun-comprehending glass,  
And beyond it, the deep blue air..._  
--Philip Larkin, "High Windows"

It is difficult, at the beginning, to fall asleep. She lies in the high hospital bed at night and watches the ceiling change colors. There is a traffic intersection two stories beneath her window, and its lights cast her darkened room in colors of aquamarine and crimson.

She lies in her bed and thinks of cars moving with purpose beneath her window. She thinks of sodium-yellow street-lights. She thinks of black roads unspooling to the edge of the horizon. She does not think of sleep; she does not surrender easily to sleep. When sleep comes (and it always comes), it finds her holding onto wakefulness with white knuckles.

She cannot explain why she does this. She does not have the words. But, perhaps, it is only this: she has slept enough. It is time for something new, something bright.

Every morning, she receives a plastic breakfast tray with mushy eggs, brown bacon, and cherry Jell-O. A month (two months, three months) of cherry Jell-o might be expected to dull anyone's enthusiasm for cherry Jell-O, but no, not her. She feels the same burst of joy, the same internal chime, whenever she sees the gelatin's glossy red surface within its small white cup. Its translucence reminds her of the stained-glass windows in a church she once saw on television. She eats with great deliberation, for each spoonful of cherry Jell-O seems to quiver on the verge of catastrophe for the entire length of its journey from cup to mouth. It wobbles with dangerous exuberance.

She always declines to eat the eggs or the bacon. She eats only the cherry Jell-O for breakfast, no matter how her nurses scold. She always drags out the end -- the last sad scrapings, the final bits of red -- because at some point after she finishes breakfast, the nurses come to bring her to physical therapy.

She does not like physical therapy, but she does not tell the nurses. She does not have the words.

When she thinks of physical therapy, she thinks of wearily walking up and down avocado-colored hallways as her therapist trots beside her, although (of course) her physical therapy comprises many kinds of muscle exercises. She does not think of that variety when she thinks of physical therapy, however; she remembers only the long and aimless hospital halls.

It is important for her to regain muscle tone, the nurses tell her. She has been asleep for so long that her muscles have softened and shrunk, the nurses tell her.

Every afternoon, after her physical therapy has ended, she moodily eats a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich (with crusts cut off) and surveys the long legs thrusting out beneath her lunch tray. The nurses may say that she has shrunk, but she feels horribly long and ungainly. When she moves through the hospital, she is always hitting walls because her elbows and her knees are further out than she thought. She feels as if she grew into a giant overnight.

When she went to sleep, she was nine.

Now she is nineteen. Every time she scratches her chest, she is startled to encounter a breast. She avoids mirrors.

The nurses are well aware that they are dealing with a child's mind in a young woman's body. With a certain amount of trepidation, early in her rehabilitation, they explain the facts of menstruation to her. They are surprised when she accepts this information calmly; she exhibits none of the denial or fear common to their own daughters.

(She does not tell the nurses, but she is secretly charmed by her periods. They seem like the flashes of something subterranean and wise beneath her skin.)

Time passes slowly in the hospital. The nurses bring her newspapers, but she is indifferent to the headlines, which sound like telegrams from Saturn. (What is a watergate?) She prefers to lie in her bed, listening to the traffic as the afternoon sunlight slides down her walls. Through her window, she can see a framed square of perfect blue. She watches the blue and waits for her papa to come.

Her papa does not come.

Time passes slowly. Each night, she eats a slab of lasagna-meatloaf-chicken-something, every dinner tasting just like yesterday's meal. The cars move outside, and the window's blue melts into stars. Night comes, and after it comes creeping, long-fingered Sleep.

Every day goes just like yesterday.

Doctors in white sit by her bed and make notes on their clipboards. They tell her that she has been in a coma for a decade. They tell her that she is making good progress. They tell her that they are having some small, slight problems getting in contact with her family, but they are sure someone will be found soon. They tell her that she is a good girl. They tell her that she is the perfect patient. And they were wondering if they could ask her a few questions...

They want her to speak, but she does not speak. She does not have the words. Instead, she watches the window of blue on the far side of her room and waits for her papa to come.

Her papa does not come.

The woman who oversees her physical therapy is sour and gruff and slowly delighted by the progress she makes after weeks of marching up and down those green halls. The woman tells her that she is nearly finished, that her therapy is nearly finished, that her body is nearly perfect. The woman, who has not talked with the doctors and their clipboards, tells her that she can go home soon. Any day now.

She does not tell the woman that her home, her family, her papa have disappeared. She does not have the words.

She eats cherry Jell-O for breakfast and watches her window flush with sunrise. The cars outside sound busy and happy.

She strides up and down green halls, and she is startled by how easily she walks around other people, how easily her elbows fit against her, how easily her knees move beneath her. Her new body is no longer an unknown territory. Her new body no longer feels new.

(It is surprisingly difficult to remember how she had moved, how she had felt, when she was nine years old.)

She listens to the doctors say that she is a good girl, that they are still looking for her family, that nothing has changed. The window behind them is blue.

She watches the red and the green flash across her ceiling at night. She tries not to sleep. There are stars in her window, the same stars as always, and somewhere on earth the sun is rising even now.

And then, one night, she wakes up.

The clock by her bed reads "3:37" in red numerals. Her room is darkly green (and then, a few seconds later, dimly red). The hospital around her has quieted to a low hum. She can hear the distant voices from the nurse station down the hall, the far-off thrum of the generators and boilers working beneath the hospital, and the occasional noise of a car's engines rising and subsiding in the streets below. These are normal noises. She knows them by heart. There is nothing in them that should have wakened her.

She sits up and slithers out of bed. Weeks ago, she could only stumble to the bathroom; she towed herself forward by gripping the bed rails and the walls. (Those were the days of dreadful sponge baths and bedpans.) Now she walks lightly and easily, almost skippingly, on long legs. She flips the bathroom switch and blinks against the harsh flood of light. When she opens her eyes again, she is looking at her mother.

Her heart punches into her throat and then, slowly, flutters back down into her chest. She squints into the mirror, and the mirror squints back.

When she was nine, she had a photograph, a little black-and-white snapshot, that showed her mother standing on a beach somewhere. The Pacific Ocean (a great dark mass with lines of whitecaps) is behind her mother, and her mother is staring solemnly at the camera. The woman in the mirror is not her mother, not quite, though the woman in the mirror has the same long dark hair and the same wide eyes.

Her mother died in a plane accident a long time ago. She does not remember her mother, only the mute photograph.

The woman in the mirror is blinking at her with a curious tilt to her mouth. She and the woman in the mirror smile uncertainly at the same moment, and suddenly she looks less like her mother and more like herself.

She strips off the short hospital gown and examines her reflection. Before, she had avoided mirrors and averted her eyes when she stood under the shower head, but now she does not flinch before the indentations on the sides of her knee, the outcropping of her hip, or the delicate line of her collarbone. She is wearing a bracelet printed with her name. The bracelet means nothing to her, but she does not take it off.

She cannot say how she feels about this body, those legs, these wrists. They seem both alien and comfortingly familiar, but she cannot name this feeling. She does not have the words.

She pours herself a glass of water from the bathroom faucet and holds the cup with both hands as she drinks. It will be morning in a few hours, she thinks, and then she will have cherry Jell-O. The nurses are still surprised that she can eat cherry Jell-O with the same delight, morning after morning, stretching back to--

She lowers the glass of water and, for the first time, she wonders how long she has been in Robbins Memorial Hospital.

She does not remember. Each day is just like the day before, and nothing ever changes. Her papa does not come, and she has no words.

She carefully puts the water glass back on the little sill beneath the bathroom mirror, and she carefully picks up the hospital gown from the tile floor and puts it back on. She walks back into her room (the red clock now reading "3:42") and stands at her little window. From this angle, she can see the intersection and the winking traffic lights and, past them, the slow dark shapes of the city and, past _them_, the bright pinpricks of stars. She knows this landscape well. It has not changed since she woke up.

But the road and the sky stretch past where she can see, and there are cars merrily thundering between a million different destinations and a million different lives.

She turns back to her room and, for the first time with clear eyes, she looks at the rumpled bed, the red clock, the dented table, the blue sheet, the closet, the--wait.

She clicks on the room's light and picks up the blue brochure. She has seen the thing from the corner of her eyes a hundred times as she lay in bed, but she was never curious enough to look at it. It is crumpled and torn at one corner, but a little map can still be made out on one side. She turns it over and reads the name of the advertised business ("Get Away From It All! At Hotel Dusk!") and her heart spasms for the second time that night.

She does not have the words, she does not have the words, she does not have the words for the screams and the man and the dark; they lie at the very back of her mouth and stop all her words dead in her throat. She has no words.

She opens her eyes and finds that she has fallen on the floor and curled into a tight knot. She wants her papa, but her papa will not come.

She lies there for a while, watching the ceiling change color. The hotel brochure is clenched in her hand. A little time passes, and then she takes a deep breath. She carefully sits up; she carefully smooths out the brochure. She stares fiercely down at it. ("Get Away From It All! At Hotel Dusk!") Then she turns it over and examines the map.

If her papa will not find her, then she must find her papa.

She leaves her room and tip-toes down the hall. There are nurses stationed in an office down the hall, but they are busy filling out forms and complaining about their supervisor. They do not notice the thin girl in the hospital gown who ghosts past their door. She finds a stairwell and clumps down two flights of stairs, her footsteps ringing loudly up and down the stairwell. The door at the bottom leads to an avocado hallway that she remembers from her physical therapy. The second door on the left leads to a changing room filled with lockers. (This room should be locked, but the janitors in the graveyard shift rarely remember to lock anything.) She wanders up and down the aisles of lockers until she finds one open. Inside is a compact of white eye-shadow, a pair of leg-warmers, two (mis-matched) tennis shoes, and a blue cotton dress.

Why does she creep out of her room? Why does she put on the blue dress? Why does she leave through another one of the hospital's should-have-been-locked staff exits? She cannot explain why she does any of this. She does not have the words. But, perhaps, it is only this: there is a sameness between sleep and her hospital days, an awful blankness, and she has slept enough.

She waits at the traffic intersection for the light to change from red to green. The drivers of waiting cars see her standing there, a pale woman wearing a blue dress and an expression of grave purpose. They see her watch the crosswalk sign intently; they see her start forward, moving confidently across the striped path. Lone women in blue are not exactly a common sight at four in the morning, and some of the drivers wonder (idly, before their own light changes) where that girl is going and what she wants.

If they asked her, she would not be able to tell them. She does not have the words. But she knows that she will find out. She knows the stars are shining over her and that, somewhere on earth, the sun is rising even now through windows of endless blue.


End file.
